We’ve got more John Edwards videos (one of him talking to bloggers in Iowa, among other things — I interview a few of the bloggers first who were invited in to talk with him — another of him talking with bloggers in New Hampshire, both are useful in seeing how a candidate is using bloggers to help get the word out). These two videos are good for those who want to study how a campaign is using bloggers to start conversations on the Internet. In the Iowa video you’ll see geek Jake Ludington, who helps out on Chris Pirillo’s’ Lockergnome site.

My favorite guy I met on the trip last week was Larry Knight. His house was destroyed in Katrina in New Orleans. In the video of him I shot you can see how high the water got. What you can’t see on the video is his great attitude. He has no money, but he’s rebuilding his house anyway with help from his friends. Anytime I’m feeling down, I’ll just replay this video and remember meeting Larry.

You thought I forgot the geeky stuff too, didn’t ya? Too much politics? Well, here you’ll meet two of my favorite tech bloggers, Don Dodge and Alfred Thompson, both work at Microsoft. We have a fun talk about New Hampshire politics and a little bit of geeky stuff too.

If you really want to avoid politics all together, then watch the videos I got of Me.dium. This is a really cool app that lets you share your Web surfing with your friends. It sounds lame, but watch the demo of Me.dium and you’ll get a sense that this is an app that we haven’t seen before. Impressed me, anyway. I have an interview with Me.dium’s founders and get more behind the scenes of what they are trying to do. This is an app you’ll see more of this year, I predict it’ll be a pretty hot one.

UPDATE: Chuck Olsen posts his video reporting on the reporters done for Rocketboom (he interviews me).

Oh, and that’s the last of the John Edwards stuff. Thanks for putting up with the political stuff. Do you have any other questions about what I experienced on John Edwards’ trip last week? Leave them in the comments here and I’ll try to answer them.

I’m touring Intel’s processor fab here outside of Portland, Oregon. I lived in Silicon Valley for more than 30 years and have never been inside a processor fab. These things are awesome, very cool to tour if you ever get a chance (very few will, they don’t like tourists inside these buildings). The building we were in is one of the cleanest places in the world. One very small piece of dirt will ruin a chip that could sell for hundreds of dollars at retail. And we are pretty dirty things as things go. I probably have kicked off millions of particles alone just today. One guy like me could ruin a whole run of processors.

Anyway, I’m under NDA so can’t reveal my Intel videos today. Coming soon. In the meantime last week I filmed an interview with John Edwards at the back of the plane. Unfortunately the interview was after I broke my camera, so I used my backup Xacti (a $700 camera that isn’t nearly as good a quality as my $4,000 Sony, especially in low light and noisy places). Funny story, I was just asking Edwards about what he wanted the tech industry to know about him and my battery died on the camera, lucky enough I was also recording audio.

Always have backups!

Anyway, the video of Edwards’ interview is here and the audio of just the part of the interview that got cut short by my battery death is here.

Nokia is giving out cell phones to bloggers just like Microsoft gave laptops out, according to Steve Garfield, who got one of the cell phones and wrote a review. These are very expensive models, too.

Again, I don’t mind this. Steve disclosed that he got it for free when he wrote his review. Now, as a reader of Steve’s blog, I have to decide whether Steve is telling the truth or not. I believe he is, he was showing the cell phone around to lots of people last week at the John Edwards’ rally in New Hampshire and it gave me lots of gadget envy.

Disclaimer of my own. I’ve gotten Nokia cell phones for free in the past too.

One memory of last week hanging out with John Edwards was him being interviewed by about a dozen news crews at 5 a.m. in the morning. I listened to his answers — I couldn’t hear the questions, because he had an earphone in his ear where you could hear the questions coming in.

One guy brought a reaction after the lights were off. Edwards told his staff something like George was snarky — gave him weird questions that were trying to throw him off. I told Edwards that I couldn’t tell from his answers, which shows how well prepared he is for different interview styles. It’s why I didn’t ask hard questions — I know these people are well trained by their staffs to always give “presidential answers.”

It is interesting, though, that the staff decided to accept an invitation from George Stephanopoulos to be on his Sunday morning show. He was George, the snarky questioner.

George’s Sunday morning interview is online now. Hey, if you watch the video, you’ll see another name that’s familar to us all: Amanda Congdon.

Interesting that the snarkiness was gone in this interview. I wonder if he was doing that just to test Edwards to see if he could hold up to pressure?

One person I’m glad to have gotten to know last year is Ed Cone. I had read him for a while — he writes for a variety of tech magazines — but I didn’t realize other stuff about him or the community he came from. His family has been part of Greensboro, North Carolina, for generations. If you visit the Converge South conference this year (he helped start that) you’ll notice that the “Cone” name is all over the place. It must be weird to come from a family that had such a huge impact on a region.

But, I find Ed to be an interesting guy. He’s very tied in with his local community. And us through his blog and tech writing. His neighbors really have no clue about that, but those tight and loose ties are evidence that something is changing in our society. We’re becoming global neighbors. Just look at Yuvi, a 15-year-old kid who lives halfway around the world from me, but seems like a kid next door for evidence of that.

One other thing Ed has is this infectuous love of politics and love of his local community. I didn’t really grok why so many great American politicians come out of the south until Maryam and I visited a local neighborhood party and had banana pudding on the front lawn of some guy’s house. It was like a Web 2.0 party in San Francisco, except there was a collegiality that just doesn’t happen in SF parties (they are getting too big, for one). I think it was all due to the banana pudding. Maryam and I have been craving it ever since. That stuff is like crack.

Anyway, Ed’s one of those guys I want to spend more time with in 2007. Oh, and wait until you meet his friend Sue Polinsky. Tech mamma of Greensboro (she helped get wifi put in city wide). She’s a hoot. Here she writes about “why ConvergeSouth.”

I don’t know what about this post of Ed’s sparked this whole thought process. I think it just caused a banana-pudding flashback.

What’s interesting is tech bloggers usually know Ed as the “Know it all” of CIO Insight magazine. The political bloggers probably know him through his political blog (he’s a supporter of John Edwards). And his local community has no clue about either of this stuff except that he helps plan a conference every year and lots of interesting people show up.

My friend (and book coauthor) Shel Israel is writing a book on global neighborhoods this year.

Shel, you gotta get to ConvergeSouth this year and have the banana pudding. When you do, you’ll see firsthand how social media is bringing together Ed Cone’s different communities.

Oh, and my life is real weird. Patrick, Maryam, and me were at Shel’s house on Christmas, and enjoying listening to his mom’s great wisdom of life. She’s a firecracker too, just like Sue is. Now we all know where Shel gets it. But, notice that we’re all brought into Shel’s life as his mother-in-law is in the hospital, thanks to a pothole in Half Moon Bay.

It’s a bizarre life, but one that’s proven to be very fulfilling. From the hot tub at LIFT (we’ll be there again) to the banana pudding at ConvergeSouth.

I wonder what new experiences we’ll have this year?

Lots of interesting people are talking about the Edge question: what are you optimistic about and why?

Last week I met hundreds of Americans in four cities. That experience made me much more optimistic about the future.

One guy, in particular, gave me a tour of his FEMA trailer in a poor, decimated, New Orleans neighborhood and then took me inside his stripped-out home that had been flooded eight feet deep with water and muck. He was black. I was white. Not that that matters, but in previous decades I probably wouldn’t have been invited into his home. He had an awesome attitude, despite the crap that life had dealt him. He made me optimistic once again that we can take on tough challenges and come through with a laugh, a smile, and a great joke about it all.

But, then I realized why he had a great attitude. He had friends who were helping him rebuild his house. They were working on making their neighborhood better. One stud at a time, one of them told me.

They made me optimistic that my son will see a better world than I’ve seen. One where we can figure out how to bootstrap communities out of poverty. One where we see the last vestiges of “isms” disappear. One where we help each other out — one nail at a time, if need be.

Thank you New Orleans for the optimism and thank you to everyone who helped get me there (Seagate, PodTech, John Edwards in particular).

Chuck Olsen was a videoblogger that was on board the Edwards plane too. He posted a video of some random moments on the trip — nothing substantial yet.

UPDATE: Sorry for continuing to post about Edwards. It’s just I’ve gone through my 450 feeds and there just isn’t that much going on in the tech world this weekend. Happy New Years! We’ll get back talking tech after everyone gets back to work on Tuesday. This week I’m interviewing some of Intel’s top technologists (rumored to include Gordon Moore, you know, the guy who’s name is on “Moore’s law.”) What do you want to know about Intel and the process of building the processors that are inside your computers?

I was just reading Memeorandum and saw this article by Dan Balz, of the Washington Post, which uses this line: “Edwards 2.0 is a revised version of his beta candidacy of 2004.” I remember when a staffer first saw someone use that moniker, showing his Blackberry over to Edwards, and saying “I hate when they say ‘Edwards 2.0′.” Edwards himself didn’t seem to mind, though.

By the way, Dan’s article is right on point with what I observed — that Edwards has spent a lot of time overseas beefing up his foreign policy depth. After spending several hours getting a grade-A education in politics from Dan (he’s been covering politics for the Washington Post since 1978) I’m now a huge fan and will read everything he writes.

Why did the staffer care so much? My guess? Because he knew that “2.0 moniker” causes debates on tech blogs. Many geeks hate the name Web 2.0 although it’s starting to stick as a descriptor for a wide range of sites that have community interaction and new-style technology and layout.

I made two big mistakes on the trip to see John Edwards. The first cost me my camera. I laid it on top of a bunch of luggage on the way to the airport in New Hampshire. Someone opened the back and it fell out and on the ground. Now the lens isn’t working anymore. I don’t know how much that’ll cost, but it means I need to rent a camera next week to go up to Intel in Portland.

Then, last night, when pulling out of the parking lot in Oakland I hit a pole. I didn’t see the damn thing when backing out. Messed up the right front of my car. I’m sure that’s gonna cost me $1,500. Sigh.

It sure reminded me that even on a good week I can really screw things up — and fast.

I found this comment over on the Connecticut Blue blog pretty insightful: “To me, a blogger is less a reporter than a voter with a lot of friends. A candidate doesn’t try to charm or convince a reporter like they do a voter.”

He links to Steve Garfield, who has some good insights. By the way, I don’t think any journalists got more than 10 minutes with the candidate. That schedule is decided by the campaign. We visited four states in three days. It isn’t possible to give anyone more time than that. More lengthy sessions will come over the course of the next year, though. I agree that if we want real depth and understanding of someone’s view on an issue we need more time than that and you need to be able to ask more than one question. I recorded that session, by the way, and will be one of the videos I get up.

Steve videoed me too while we were waiting for Edwards to show up in New Hampshire.